While Core Ultra 200S is a step in the right direction for Intel in terms of efficiency, the series’ surprisingly lacking performance profile looms large after launch. Collective cries of disappointment, including Tarinder’s personal lamentations in his Core Ultra 9 285K review, thankfully haven’t fallen on deaf ears. According to the processor giant, a plethora of problems are holding back the full potential of its new CPUs.
Long story short, the Core Ultra 200S launch may share unfortunate similarities with that of AMD’s Ryzen 9000 series. In a recent interview with Hot Hardware, Intel’s Robert Hallock shared that the company has “identified a series of issues at the BIOS and OS level” affecting performance below expected levels. This has, according to Hallock, “inspired a fairly large response internally to get to the bottom of what happened and to fix it.” If you’re feeling déjà vu reading these statements, you’re not alone.
While Hallock wasn’t at liberty to share finer details, I expect we’ll see Intel deploy fixes for Core Ultra 200S processors akin to those AMD first published for Ryzen 9000 chips as part of Windows 11 24H2. Hopefully lessons learned from the company’s Raptor Lake microcode patches will help smooth out any potential post-launch polish.
Any efforts to make Core Ultra 200S more competitive will need to be swift, however, given the advent of AMD’s most recent challenger, Ryzen 7 9800X3D. Worse still for Intel, the likes of Ryzen 9 9950X3D will soon combine the advantages of 3D V-Cache with higher core and thread counts, all bundled under the Zen 5 architecture.
While Hallock commendably highlights that Core Ultra 200S performance shortfalls are no fault of reviewers, it does make the business of assessing them frustrating for all involved. While Club386 and other outlets will inevitably put these CPUs to the test once again following any significant changes, it’ll be difficult for Intel to shake this middling first impression. In the meantime, though, we have ample comparisons relative to Ryzen 9 7950X3D and Core i9-14900K for you to pour over.
Until Intel quantifies what a “fix” for Core Ultra 200S performance means with benchmark data, it’s difficult to say how excited we should be. Nonetheless, I hold out hope and will be waiting with bated breath. Here’s hoping the apparent imminent Battlemage launch brings more joy to the company and consumers alike.
